"You
think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism.
I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A tug here, a push
there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn."

--Sir John Buchan
(1875-1940)

Gold-plated
plaque in a Taoist temple, Beijing

Souvenir
sellers at a tourist bus stop in Xian, China

"These
folks live in sort of a splendid isolation, waiting for the overthrow
of the current government in Beijing."

Photographs
of interrogators who later became victims hang from the wall in Tuol Sleng.

"...the
barbarians are still very much in evidence. These days they wear mirror
sun glasses, drive Toyota Land Cruisers and English Range Rovers, drink
Johnny Walker Black over long loud breakfasts in hotel dining rooms, and
terrorize the civilian population with polished sidearms..."

Magazine
Winter 1999

Hearts
of Darkness "Hijacked by capitalists" in China and talking
with survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, a psychology professor
chronicles the human toll when institutions of law and justice collapse
under "the reign of Saturn."

It was 10 p.m. on a Sunday and the Beijing
terminal was nearly deserted. Northwest Orient's feckless five-hour delay
in Detroit meant that I was too late to get to my hotel by bus. The only
people around at this hour were at the "local transportation"
counter. From the look of that line, I wouldn't make it to my hotel before
breakfast, even assuming I could somehow learn to speak Chinese by the
time I reached one of the listless information clerks.

Suddenly my bags were scooped up by a small band of young Chinese men.
I was hustled out of the terminal through a VIP entrance to a large black
Toyota parked under a sign that announced ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING AT ANY
TIME.

I had been hijacked by capitalists.

My guidebooks had warned me that this might happen, and in five minutes
I had stubbornly bargained my way down to an amount only slightly more
than double the guidebook's suggested rate for the 30-minute trip downtown
in an unmarked pirate "taxi." The driver was a stern young woman
who took her job entirely seriously. She managed to avoid several police
checkpoints on the superhighway by driving through parking lots and down
back streets between a maze of high-rise apartment buildings. Her companion
was a mysterious fellow wearing enough gold jewelry for an opening act
in a downtown Las Vegas casino. He kept flashing a great roll of American
currency at me.

The Total Shopping Experience
This unlikely character narrated our trip, and had I not been fluent in
English and completely exhausted I might have appreciated his pointing
out to me the hundreds of English language neon signs that lined our way
announcing every conceivable American and Japanese consumer product and
franchise. Somewhere between the Holiday Inn Lido and the "original"
Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, he pointed to a nondescript piece of
roadway and said, "And here is where the young student defied the
tank. He was a very great hero. But now of course he is quite dead."

Welcome to the new China.

Not that the old China I remembered from our first trip in 1981 had disappeared
entirely. Outside my hotel window in the western suburbs, coal-fired steam
locomotives worked 24 hours a day in railway yards, and thousands of people
bicycled past streetcars full to bursting with humanity. The air was still
unbreathable with smog that never let up, the water was still undrinkable,
and the young army recruits from the countryside still held hands as they
walked wide-eyed through the gates and courtyards of the Forbidden City.
The hotel was slick, but since it was owned by the Party, the food was
wretched. One memorable lunch consisted of stewed ox lungs.

I happened to be in China over the May 1 Labor Day weekend; I don't
know whether I was more surprised by the total absence of any military
parades or by the total dedication of the local population to turning
this most revolutionary of workers' holidays into a total shopping experience.
The crowds at Macy's in New York a week before Christmas pale in comparison
to the Labor Day crowds in Beijing. I had the feeling that a billion Chinese
had decided quite literally to shop 'til they dropped.

The city was also celebrating the 100th anniversary of Beijing University
that weekend--mainly by closing off the roads in and out of the university
quarter. (It was one week away from the ninth anniversary of the Tienamin
Square massacre.) A student told me over a beer that several hundred undercover
government security agents had infiltrated the campus. These men--and
even I could spot them--reinforced the silent message of the video cameras
that were posted on lampposts in every public place I went. That message,
from what I'd experienced in Beijing thus far, evidently was, "The
Party wants you to go shopping."

"It's good to be rich" was all that remained of Mao's revolutionary
rhetoric.

Last spring, Western movies about Tibet were hot in the Americas and
Europe and were extremely critical of China's overthrow of the Dalai Lama
and the 1951 war that resulted in China's annexation of Tibet. Yet in
Beijing last spring, you'd never have guessed there was any controversy.
The Chinese response was everything a Party Madison Avenue advertising
cadre would have hoped. The giant posters in the streets were never exactly
clear about what "our glorious revolutionary armies" freed the
Tibetan people from, but from what I could gather from Beijing television,
newspapers, and cultural exhibits, the Tibetan masses were overjoyed to
have been forcefully reunited with China under communism. How many thousands
were slaughtered in the process was not mentioned.

When I finally arrived at Tienamin Square, it was largely deserted, perhaps
in large part because access to the square has been made all but impossible
by the erection of pedestrian barriers both above and below ground.

"Your Tax Dollars at
Work"
As I'd planned my trip last winter, I'd been intrigued by the thought
of traveling between Beijing and Xian by overnight train. Boarding that
train, I saw large, completely sealed-off and heavily guarded waiting
rooms for "Our Hong Kong Brothers and Sisters," while at the
other end of the station was a waiting room tagged "Foreign Friends."
The level of police intrusion into the lives of train passengers served
as a constant reminder that in China the government still tightly controls
every aspect of everyday life.

By the time we arrived in Xian (another shopping mecca, as it turned
out), I had had my fill of "the glorious revolution." I wondered
how many people in China could truly be supportive of the regime's aging
dictators and their cynical "it's good to get rich "view of
human progress. In the end, my guide in Xian summed it up more eloquently
than I ever could have: As we pulled to the side of one of the modern
new highways to let a wedding procession go roaring past, we stared in
wonder as the bride's brothers showed off her dowry of a clothes washer,
a refrigerator, and a water heater, all still in their boxes. "Another
rich peasant bride," my guide sneered in English. "Let's see
how happy she'll be a year from now." The woman could have been speaking
metaphorically about her entire country.

Leaving China always feels more like an escape than a departure, and
the feeling this time was as pervasive as it had been 20 years earlier.
I was en route to Cambodia to fulfill a lifelong dream of seeing the ruins
of Angkor Watt, but the best way to get there was to go by way of Bangkok.
With the Thai bhatt devalued to about 50 cents on the dollar, I couldn't
resist taking some time to see a bit of northern Thailand.

In the mountainous north where I was headed, Thailand is populated by
isolated groups of ethnic Burmese, Laotians, Hmong, and Chinese, most
of whom live on a thriving narcotics trade and by illegally clear-cutting
the last remaining rain forests in southeast Asia. All of these people
are one way or another geopolitical refugees. Few of them would have much
chance of survival in their native lands if they were repatriated.

I had lunch my first day in the country in a very prosperous but completely
isolated village near the Burmese border. Here the last remains of the
old Nationalist Chinese Army settled after the final victory of Mao's
revolutionary forces. Having moved here when most of their compatriots
fled to Taiwan, these folks live in a sort of splendid isolation, waiting
for the overthrow of the current government in Beijing. Until recently
they were supported almost exclusively by not-so-secret money from the
American CIA, whose idea it was to keep an anticommunist "third force"
at the ready to take over the government of a democratic China. Or so
our government reasoned back in the 1950s. "Your tax dollars at work!"
my Thai translator chuckled.

Thailand is a wonderful, beautiful, and magical place. It seems ironic
that it is now the primary vacation destination of working class Japanese
and rich Chinese on sex tours, though most of them head for the fleshpots
along Thailand's southern resort coasts. From the veranda of my resort
hotel on the Mekong River at Thailand's northernmost point, I could look
down to see small groups of incredibly young-looking girls in brightly
lit cafes waiting for customers who took them away in sport utility vehicles
and military 4-wheel drives, while across the river to the west Burma
(Mynamar) and to the north Laos lay silent in absolute total darkness.
Once in a while the sound of a small outboard motor could be heard on
the river—probably a Laotian peasant towing a stolen teak log or a boatload
of raw opium to clandestine markets somewhere down river. I recalled how
this trade had provided an important piece of the financing that kept
the defeated rebel Khmer Rouge army solvent for more than a decade--an
often-fatal half-day's journey downstream in Cambodia. I wouldn't have
been at all surprised if the legendary Mr. Kurtz had come up to me on
that dark hotel veranda to offer me a gin and tonic.

Faces of the Dead
Even in the mountains Thailand had been sweltering, and I had more or
less assumed that this would help me acclimate to Cambodia's notorious
heat and humidity. Getting off the small Royal Air Camboge plane at Angkor
Watt, however, was a transforming experience. I melted into a country
of intolerable heat and history.

The short drive to town from the airstrip revealed signs of recent warfare
on virtually every building. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge government had
murdered between 1.5 and 2 million of their own people in less than four
years between April 1975, when they seized control of the capital, Phnom
Penh, and 1979 when the Vietnamese army drove them into exile deep in
the jungles. On April 18, less than a month before I arrived and a week
after his death, Pol Pot's earthly remains had been incinerated in a garbage
dump.

Nothing could have prepared me for the shock of Cambodia. I had read
several histories and knew that the murderous regime of Pol Pot's Khmer
Rouge had ended when the Vietnamese Army had invaded Cambodia and driven
the remnants of the Khmer Rouge into the jungles. From several Western
news accounts I also knew the dark horrible secret that Pol Pot and his
regime survived only because of the covert financial and overt political
support of the United States under three presidents. Cold War politics
had caused us to side with Pol Pot, who was protected by China, and to
make common cause with depravity against the Vietnamese invaders who were
then allied with the Evil Empire of the USSR. But when I walked through
Tuol Sleng, the modern suburban high school that in the 1970s had been
turned into the main torture center where 20,000 Cambodians had been "processed"
before being murdered as enemies of the revolution, I realized a horror
I could barely comprehend.

The Khmer Rouge had systematically photographed every one of their victims
in this place of death. The pictures of those about to be executed are
hung by the hundreds, like a hellish wallpaper, in every room. They were
teachers and students, mothers and grandmothers; they were shopkeepers
and sanitation workers; they were all doomed. The eyes of the now-dead
stare out at us, pleading, terrified. A young American college student
and I were alone in one room. "My God," he whispered, "they
look at us like they want to tell us we were responsible for what was
about to happen to them." "I think they did," was all I
could say.

Bringing Back the Reign
of Saturn
Wabash College President Andrew Ford, in his talk to the faculty at the
beginning of this school year, quoted the English author John Buchan,
who wrote earlier in this century:"You think that a wall as solid
as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division
is a thread, a sheet of glass. A tug here, a push there, and you bring
back the reign of Saturn."

It seemed wherever I went on my travels this past summer, barbarism was
more than just an abstraction; it was recent memory. Whether it was the
slaughter of students in Tienamin Square; the subjugation of Tibetans
to a brutal materialistic atheism; the political, economic, and civil
bleakness of Laos; the brutish dictatorship in Burma, or the mass destruction
of human life in Cambodia--the barbarians were not just at the gates,
they were as real and present as the kalashnikov assault rifles
in the hands of raw teenage recruits, and the hundreds of human skulls
that have been mounded in the shape of the map of Cambodia behind plate-glass
display cabinets.

In Phnom Penh--where in April 1975 money had been abolished, and all
clocks were reset to the Year Zero; where everyone with eyeglasses, education,
books, art, or any international experience was immediately put to death;
where to complain of starvation meant a bullet in the head--the barbarians
are still very much in evidence. These days they wear mirror sunglasses,
drive Toyota Land Cruisers and English Range Rovers, drink Johnny Walker
Black over long, loud breakfasts in hotel dining rooms, and terrorize
the civilian population with polished sidearms that are used without restraint
against anyone who happens to give offense. They are drug smugglers, pimps,
timber thieves, money launderers, and the sons of highly placed officials
(the current strong man, Hun Sen, has a son at West Point). They are the
newest manifestations of mankind's oldest fears. They are the very face
of evil.

And yet, somehow the human heart survives. Sitting under shade trees
on brutally hot afternoons I listened to hours of heated debates among
young tour guides and souvenir hawkers about Cambodia's then-upcoming
elections: Do you vote for the dictator in the hope it will legitimize
his power, or do you vote your conscience and risk renewed outbreaks of
civil war?

I spent most of a morning drinking tea with the elderly Mrs. Cheap, a
Cambodian shopkeeper who had several pieces I really wanted to purchase,
but who was far more generous with her time and her tea than she was in
her willingness to haggle over prices.

I was served simple and wonderfully creative French dinners in nearly
empty restaurants by boys in their mid-teens--the proprietor explained
that although he had escaped to Thailand during the Khmer Rouge dictatorship,
all of his former employees had been executed.

I had a long late-afternoon conversation with my 40-year-old translator
and guide in Phnom Penh who had lost nearly every member of her family
to the Khmer Rouge insanity simply because they all knew how to speak
French. All she wanted to know was: Did Americans know about the suffering
of her people?

Compared to the delay-ridden, anger-filled flight to Beijing weeks earlier,
my trip home on Thai Air was a wonderful self-indulgent treat. But as
I thought back on the hassles and short tempers a month before in the
departures lounge in Detroit, I wondered how many Americans have any idea
how trivial and inconsequential most of our problems would be in the eyes
of most of the peoples of our planet. We live in a time and a place where
we can take efficiency, courtesy, and even decency completely for granted.
I had traveled to places where the police have powers that we cannot comprehend.
I had been in villages where 12-year-old girls are sold off for prostitution.
I had seen a country still in the grip of the tyranny of barbarians. I
had seen the faces and heard the stories of the dead. And yet everywhere
I was treated with kindness; and all anyone ever asked was that we not
forget what had happened to them.